AN EMPTY PRETENCE

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIV, Issue 10, 22 December 1933, Page 6

AN EMPTY PRETENCE

On behalf of the Napier Harbour Board majority there is a very obvious effort being made to create the impression that they are quite well pleased with the passing of their Breakwater Loan Bill in the amended form it has eventually taken. It may be just as well to prick this pretence at once. For an administration that has for many months shown itself determined to deprive the country ratepayers of a longstanding right, now to profess pleasure at that right being preserved has to any intelligent ear but a very hollow sound. Great praise is being accorded to the Member for Napier for the skill with which the measure was navigated onto the Statute Book. It does not, however, require very much knowledge of parliamentary procedure to understand that in offering strenuous opposition to the Legislative Council’s altogether reasonable amendment—an amendment, by the way, also recommended by the Local Bills Committee—lay the only hope of killing the Bill, with its threefifths majority clause as passed by the House. This would, of course, have well suited tjie purpose of the Board majority with some £50,000 of the ratepayers’ money already in hand to play with at will until Parliament met again, when no doubt another endeavour would be made to push through the bare-majority clause. It was, as a matter of fact, only in order to save the Bill that the Council was induced to forgo an amendment the sound principle of which is still firmly maintained. The only convincing way in which the Board majority can give practical expression to its satisfaction is by putting the measure into immediate operation and taking a poll of the ratepayers.